We Are Free to Change the World, an intellectual biography of Hannah Arendt, is Lesley Stonebridge’s seventh book, and is informed by the author’s expertise in twentieth-century literature, history, law, and political theory. Stonebridge is a Professor of Humanities and Human Rights at the University of Birmingham, and a regular contributor to the New Statesman. A successful scholar, she is also used to communicating to audiences beyond the academy.

Rowan Williams employs the label ‘intellectual biography’ on the book’s back cover, but I admit that I am not entirely comfortable with the categorisation. Intellectual biography is most often employed as a subtitle, self-selected by author or publisher, as in, for example, Giovanni Fresu’s recent Antonio Gramsci: An intellectual biography (Palgrave, 2023), which the publisher describes as ‘a comprehensive overview of the process of development of Gramsci’s philosophical-political thought’. Broadly speaking, an intellectual biography emphasises the way the subject’s lived experience has informed and shaped their thinking over time. Stonebridge’s book on Arendt does operate as intellectual biography in this way, but it is also doing something more.